In the current Journal of Patient Safety, they estimate anywhere from 210,000 to 440,000 people die each year from preventable medical mistakes.

This means dying in the hospital from preventable mistakes is the third leading cause of death behind heart disease which is first and cancer which is second.

All people murdered by whatever means were 12,765 by FBI crime stats of 2012, yep, doctors and hospitals are the true “weapons of mass destruction”, as the anti-gun people are so fond of saying; not the guns they harp on about.

I was doing Medicinal Herbal consultations for a couple of years; most of the people that came to us was as a last resort because western medicine was not helping them; it was usually maker them sicker.

We were able to help almost 75% of the people with their chronic health issues; many times for the first time in years.

Western medicine is usually best for traumatic situations; car wrecks, heart attacks, surgeries, etc, Traditional Chinese Medicine or other Holisitc modalities are generally better for long term health.

From the same survey: “Eighty-six percent of the pediatricians surveyed agree or strongly agree that gun-control legislation will help reduce the risks of injury or death among children and adolescents.”

18% is a high number when it is something so extreme as “remove from home”.
On the other hand, if 86% essentially believe that gun control will help children, then a good 14% think that it really won’t help, and many of those likely think that it generally won’t help society in general. 14% is a minority, but a considerable minority.

Especially since the AAP has been highly anti-gun for a long time, recommending that member physicians have ‘the talk’ and recommend removal of guns. Hearing that 82% of pediatricians ignore the propaganda is very good to know!

Before my daughter was born the OB office asked my wife no fewer than 200 questions before accepting her as a patient. I was there, but as she was the patient she did most of the talking. Stuffed into the middle of all those questions was:

“Are there guns in the house?”

To which my loving wife, tired of questions answered “yes.”

After a LONG conversation her and I both agree that that will be the last time a physician recieves an answer to that question, either in the affirmative or the negative. It really boils down to none of their damn business.

I don’t care who it is, if somebody I don’t know well asks me if I have guns in the house my answer is “no.” Best answer to almost anyone who wants to know, and on the off chance the person is sizing me up for a burglary victim, better to have them think I have less that is worth stealing.

Yep- our language is flexible enough to bend any fact to the will of the writer. ‘The Devil can cite scripture for his purpose’ and all that.

A very close member of my family was a country doctor for about four decades, and a number of the firearms in his cabinet were sold or given to him by patients, in his office. I’m certain you couldn’t pry their names out of him with a pair of heated pliers, and their records never identified anything about the patients’ personal possessions or activities.

jwm, while your big heart is admirable, there’s no way one man can take on the care and feeding of so many orphaned guns. I’ll volunteer to provide a home as well, where they will cleaned, exercised, and taken for multiple daily walks.
“And I will pet them, and pat them, and hug them and squeeze them and call them George.”

I have worked in pediatrics for years and have NEVER ONCE reccomended that a firearm be removed from a home. I have encouraged numerous families however to acquire firearms for protection of their homes and families as well as encouraging them to teach their children to shoot. Shhh, don’t tell the AAP.

I am generally an outlier in the pediatric community in general, what with my beliefs in liberty and personal responsibility. I have maintained my membership only as a requirement of my job. The AMA, on the other hand, has not seen a dime of my cash in quite some time, and never will.

What percentage of the population die in socialist nations from guns in the hands of a socialist government? I know that there is a much smaller number of people being killed by guns in the public sector simply because they don’t have them… but what, exactly is the percentage of citizens in Russia or China, or Mexico, killed by Corrupt Governments and Organized Crime?

If you look at Mexico alone….. you might want to sit down before you read it.

I find it a bit odd that this 18% statistic was mentioned here when the article also says that 92% of those surveyed think that pediatricians should support gun control (and also the 77% statistic that Johnny mentioned).

The day is coming where your child will mention having gone hunting or to the range or mention that their dad has guns or “my dad can beat up your dad because he has a gun” and then suddenly they’ll come for your child or your guns or both.

One needs to be ready for this…I am the authority on my child’s life…not someone else. Someone coming for my firearms or my family will not be greeted kindly.

Sounds like 18% of the physicians surveyed are fools. I don’t doubt that firearms as a hobby or lifestyle does carry some risks. However, those risks are to be weighed against the benefits and the ability of the individual to withstand them. The idea that firearms are so bad across the board that a physician would always recommend removal, without consideration of an individual’s circumstances, is the sort of shortcut to thinking that often leads to malpractice.

If you have asthma or emphysema, then maybe an indoor range isn’t for you, but outdoor is fine. If you’re pregnant or may become pregnant, then perhaps gloves and minimal contact with lead ammo is appropriate. An Alzheimer’s patient might be one who should consider removal, depending in the state of their condition. But there certainly is no one size fits all solution. Physicians suggesting otherwise are violating their oath and abusing their patients’ trust.

“The idea that firearms are so bad across the board that a physician would always recommend removal, without consideration of an individual’s circumstances, is the sort of shortcut to thinking that often leads to malpractice.”
This is another indicator of a problem I’m seeing increasingly in doctors: they’re trained to treat your symptoms instead of curing the underlying disease.

That’s interesting, Bill. What might,be driving that? Desire for repeat business, or is it just easier to write a prescription and get to the next patient? A lot of conditions require lifestyle changes either as part of the cure or as a result of the cure. In those cases, doctors may be limited by the degree of patient cooperation they encounter. I’m not sure.

I’m thinking that’s driven by time both constraints and the endless parade of new drugs to enable a “prescribe a pill to fix it” approach. A number of pharmacists I know have told be that they regularly call doctors to have prescriptions changed because of drug interactions, some serious to fatal. And think about it – does your doctor come in with a tablet, punch in your symptoms, and have the resulting scrip printed out (complete with signature)? Deductive reasoning is now out of the process – they’re just overeducated technicians.

Here in hoplophobic Massachusetts, most of my physicians are pro-gun. But if one of my doctors wanted to lecture me about guns, I would first lecture them about their hands. Because it seems like their mitts are killing a lot more people than my guns.

I wonder what they say about riding motorcycles or maybe horseback riding (which is more dangerous). If it were up to some doctors- and many insurance companies- we’d have to sit around eating sprouts and occasionally working out on a treadmill (medium setting only!) our whole lives, because going out of the house kills…

As a doctor (surgeon), I can tell you several things from my own observations:
1) My fellow physician friends and I are mostly all conservative, freedom-loving, second-amendment-recognizing folks…who often also enjoy firearms for recreation and self-defense.
2) A weirdly disproportionate number of pediatricians are liberals given the overall political bias in the medical field. Not sure why this is, though.
3) Since firearms injuries–including pediatric firearms injuries–are usually not treated by pediatricians but by surgeons, ER docs, and intensivists, I’m not sure why so much weight is given to what pediatricians think on the matter. You may as well poll pediatricians about what they think on the the state of the military or the effects of quantitative easing on the stock market.

So then tell me, why is the AMA so anti-gun? Is it because so many Jewish physicians are (as a lot of other Jews) so anti-gun? (Not being anti-Semitic–Robert has mentioned this incomprehensible aversion on numerous occasions.)

It’s not just the doctors either. The ABA (based on a vote of its board of directors, not a vote of its membership) also came out very anti-gun, which raised a shit storm of epic proportions. [Disclaimer: I am not a member of the ABA–I didn’t think that paying $400 a year membership dues for a magazine I wouldn’t find the time to read didn’t make any sense. Never had to think on it beyond that.]

I first heard about this campaign to ask about guns at home about 10 years ago when I was in med school. There’s a fairly broad recognition within medicine that public health efforts (e.g. sanitation, vaccination, etc) do more ‘good’, i.e., extend more healthy years than medical intervention. This was extended to personal wellness, i.e., diet and exercise, then from there to safety measures, like wearing a bicycle helmet, seatbelts and car seats.

On it’s face it makes sense to address gun ownership; guns play a significant role in increasing the lethality of domestic abuse and suicide attempts and of course gun handling “accidents”.In private I used to snark that “Guns don’t kill people, physicians do” based on the IOM’s estimate of medical error related fatalities. Of course if you spoke to them privately the physicians behind this campaign would admit that the risk of injury or death by firearm is not evenly distributed across the population. They’d also admit that it’s hard to tease out causality in suicide, whether using a gun makes an attempt more lethal or whether people intent on killing themselves sought out more lethal methods.

For me, it was about harm reduction. When I was with patients I would ask if there were guns at home, then whether they were properly secured when not on your person. If the answer was no, then the question becomes why not and we’d talk about some of the bad things that can happen when kids or burglars get a hold of your weapon. I personally never encouraged anyone to get rid of their guns.

I was probably an outlier, quite a bit more pro-gun than my classmates, but I’ve found that the anti-gun sentiment is stronger among younger docs… likely part and parcel of the trend away from entrepreneurial private practice to employed practice in corporate setting.

I thought (and still think) that a physician’s job is to ask questions that no one else asks, i.e., do you have sex with men, women or both? Have you thought about killing yourself? Are you safe at home? Does anyone hit you? Part of training was learning to go outside of your normal comfort zone and ask personal questions. Just like it’s our job to perform examinations in places we weren’t comfortable touching. Privacy means keeping your patients secrets to yourself. I see the electronic health record, with it’s vast potential for centralization and big data searches as a huge threat to that. The other critical thing was to respect the patient’s autonomy. If they didn’t want to quit smoking, that was their choice and browbeating them was never encouraged. I hope that current medical students are trained to respect their patient’s choices wrt guns.

Dr Duh,
As to your comment about Dr’.s having to ask questions made me remember once back in 88 my ex tripped and feel down a fight of stairs AND BROKE HER LEG. I took her to the emergency room and was setting in the waiting when all of a sudden I heared my wife scream “Listen to me you stupid SOB FOR THE LAST TIME MY HUSBAND DID NOT PUSH ME DOWN THE STAIRS! ARE YOU F’n STUPID OR DEAF!